“Yesterday a child came out to wander…”
—Joni Mitchell, “Circle Game”

Last month, a friend I’ve known most of my life passed away after a recurrence of cancer. It was not entirely unexpected, but it happened suddenly and was deeply shocking. I thought she would always be there—an unspoken assumption many of us probably have about close friends or family. We never imagine that they won’t be in our lives. Yet she was gone. And even the most profound spiritual beliefs about life after death cannot entirely prevent the initial heart pain of losing someone you love.

Eastern religions do not have a tradition of "grief" as it is understood in the Western world. Nevertheless, many Eastern religions have practices that help people in their grieving process.

The process of grieving is similar in all cultures, but the meaning of grief is different. In Eastern religions, a death does not represent a single event, but a life “cut short” at some point along the continuum of time.

Below we explore how Eastern religions generally view grief, along with their philosophical teachings.

Buddhism and grief

In Buddhism, the ultimate goal is to free oneself from the cycle of suffering, and grief is seen as one of the many manifestations of this cycle.

5 Tips to Cope with Grief during Pandemic

Permission to Grieve is Granted

This pandemic has stirred up many emotions from hope in seeing our healthcare and essential workers on the front line, to despair for the deaths and rising cases, to fear over loss of employment, to anxiety for handling the daily updates and home situation, to an even more prevalent one – grief.

During the pandemic, I wholeheartedly believe and affirm that grief is a natural emotion people are feeling for various reasons and one that is justified. Right now, the grief I am seeing in my therapy patients ranges from disappointment and sadness to frustration and anger. People are disappointed by having to reschedule events like weddings, sad about not being able to see family members, frustrated by losing out on once-in-a lifetime events, and angry from the lack of control and unfairness of it all.

The biggest grief reactions I am witnessing are connected to the loss of major events, particularly funerals because of the inability for family members to give their loved one the proper goodbye they wanted. While you can hold a memorial at a later date, there are no do-overs for a funeral.

6 Tips for Using Mindfulness to Navigate Grief

The world is struggling under the weight of grief right now; there’s no denying it. With the renewed fight to end racial injustice and the lingering realities of the coronavirus pandemic and all its implications, we all have a lot on our emotional plates.  

As of this writing, around 119,000 people have died from COVID-19 in the United States alone, and numbers continue to rise. People are grieving loved ones lost to the pandemic, lives destroyed by racial violence, and dreams crushed by cancelled graduations and weddings. Grief takes many forms, and it happens when we are in mourning for someone or something lost to us that has a huge impact on our lives.

If you are grieving, you are not alone — and you don’t need to suffer in silence. Mindfulness is a gentle and effective tool any of us can use to lessen the weight of grief as we navigate it. Give yourself a little present, right here and now, and try one or more of these mindfulness tips. As the saying goes: pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.

Dealing with the Death of KOBE

Kobe Bryant, along with his daughter and 7 others died tragically on January 26th.

Losing a loved one is never easy.

Grief is a natural process. Yet we have a tendency to suppress it and avoid feeling it. This only keeps you stuck in the pain.

We often think that if we feel the grief it will last forever. But no feelings last forever. All feelings when fully felt dissolve.

Or that if we feel the grief we will never survive.

So if you lost someone you love, give yourself full permission to feel the pain fully. It will break your heart open to a bigger dimension of love than you knew before.

Ringo

I was raised with cows, horses, goats, dogs and a couple other species of animals.  These creatures and our very large garden, taught me at a young age, about the time and energy involved in animal and garden care.  I love plants, but choose to not commit the time to growing them.  For many years that’s how I viewed animals.  I love animals. I even eat a plant based diet because of my spiritual beliefs that acknowledges the sanctity of animals.  Still I didn’t have the time needed to properly care for an animal.

When my children were no longer babies I finally decided I had the energy and resources required to care for a family dog.  This is after years of our oldest child asking for a puppy.

My husband was shocked when my stance of no, no, never..  changed to, “ lets get a poodle.”

That is how Ringo came into our lives.  We bought him from someone out of state.  She claimed her poodles had service dog dispositions.  Ringo was born in December and he came to us in April.  We picked him up at the airport in the evening.  When we opened the crate he was all legs.  He looked more like a young horse then a dog.  He quickly became part of our life.  For the first few years our oldest was the person that slept with and helped care for him.

How Practicing Yoga Can Help You Overcome Grief

There’s everything from chocolate yoga to cat yoga to trap yoga, but there’s also a not-so carefree counterpart: grief yoga, which has provided healing for those suffering since long before cats made their way to the mat. We spoke with Beth Shaw — founder and president of YogaFit, the largest yoga training and certification program in the world — about the merits of this often-overlooked method of healing and how to practice it.

Shaw first experienced the interaction of grief and yoga after a breakup in her late 20s. She says she immersed herself in yoga daily to the point where it became her new “anchor,” replacing the old one of her ex-boyfriend and their romantic connection. “You know, science has shown that a broken heart is legitimate,” shares Shaw. More than simple sadness, grief can be all-consuming. “Grief is a mind-body experience,” Shaw agrees, explaining that it can affect one’s hormone production, cortisone levels, appetite, sleep patterns, energy levels, heart rate, and more. It makes sense, then, that yoga, a bodily activity, can help mitigate the overwhelming emotion. Yoga is a “healing tool,” Shaw says. “It can lift you from the depths of despair.”

Mark Nepo's Weekly Reflection: Where Are You?

My teacher appeared to me

in the midst of my grief for him.

Losing a loved one is never easy.

On September 27, 2017, my dear mother made her transition from her body.

My mother was the purest soul I’ve met in this lifetime. She was unconditional love beyond human understanding. Her only desire was to serve and do God’s work in all ways.

I was so close to her my entire life, but strangely in her passing even more so. I feel her everywhere now. It’s once she left her body that I understood who she really was now that her loving was no longer limited to a human form.

In the year she knew she was dying, I once asked her if she was afraid. She simply looked at me with unwavering conviction and kindness and said, “Not at all. I am not this body. The soul lives forever. I am ready for whatever God wants for my life.”

In her last months, I realized my mother’s true greatness was in her depth of surrender to the Divine.

My favorite memory (I have so many) was simply holding her in my arms one day, my heart bursting with love, looking her in the eyes, and sharing what a profound privilege it was to incarnate in this lifetime as her son, to have had the opportunity to be loved by her and know a soul as beautiful as her.

This past week has been a blur.

Have you ever felt that you’ve been swept up in a tornado of feelings that you can’t control and don’t even know the source?

It’s been surreal if you think about everything that has happened in the past month alone- a relentless tsunami of suffering and tragedy- all of it real, all of it needing to count.

Which do you pick? The devastation in the Caribbean? Texas? Louisiana? Las Vegas? Or should we look overseas?

I live here in North America and so what happens closest to me is on the news and I’m more exposed to the locale but this is all but a snapshot symbol of a deep insistent global pain, that we feel rising up from an unknown space within us, and we don’t even know what to call it and we resist it by deflecting it through rage and apathy, fear and denial.

But it’s all about waking us up – to what lies beyond this nameless pain.